Mastering The Phones: The 3 Cs of Phone Skills Mastery (PART 1)

TRANSCRIPT: Hi, this is Steve Stauning with another ‘Steve Stauning Short & Sweet Video Training Lesson’. Today’s lesson: Mastering the phones. How to OWN the phones by remembering the 3 C’s of phone skill mastery.
Now, let me start out from the beginning – I don’t like phone training. I really do not like phone training. While I tend to do a lot of it, it’s not my favorite skill to teach. It’s because no matter how much phone skills training your company pays for, it’s all worthless without two important extras: 1) we need management reinforcement, which we almost never get, and, 2) we need salesperson mastery.

Management reinforcement, in automotive retail, anyway, is something that keep the legions of phone trainers busy and rich. If managers would simply reinforce the training that they got in 1985, or ‘95 or last year, phone trainers would be out of business, wouldn’t they? See, if sales managers would just reinforce that, they would actually bankrupt the phone training industry.

I’m going to give you a little secret about phone skills. See, talking on the phone to some prospect is not a skill that requires a PHD. Therefore, if your managers did their job, you wouldn’t need to hire an expensive phone trainer, would you?

Really, though, today’s lesson is about the 3 C’s you need to know to own the phones. Salesperson mastery is internal to each salesman, saleswoman and BDC agent attending yet another phone skills training class. Salesperson mastery is the difference between learning some cool, new ‘talk tracks’, and becoming an expert on the phone. It’s not about ‘talk tracks’. Managers think my job is to give their team the right word tracks and nature will take its course. That’s not the case. See, this works great for about 72 hours and, then, without reinforcement, everything falls to crap.

Everyone goes back to talking on the phone the same way they did before I arrived.

You ever wonder why you have to keep hiring the same phone trainer again and again? It’s because it’s not about talk tracks. It’s about salesperson mastery. Listen to this: are you like some of the big companies out there who waste tens of thousands of dollars every month on phone training videos while your team stays the same; while your market share stays the same? Well, what good is the phone training that you’re getting? It’s because your managers aren’t reinforcing anything, all the while your salespeople ‘pick and choose’ the talk track that they like rather than mastering the art of phone skills.

I’m gonna give you another secret: salesperson mastery is easy. It’s almost as easy as management reinforcement, though, because we know that is probably never going to happen at your store, let’s focus on getting the salespeople to actually master the material.

Salesperson mastery of the phones just requires three things. We call them the 3 C’s of phone skill mastery. That’s Competence, Confidence and Control.